An Adoptee Returns to South Korea, and Changes Follow

“In a country where ‘American’ is used synonymously with ‘white,’ my inability to speak fluent Korean combined with my inability to be white is a deformity.” JANE JEONG TRENKACredit
Woohae Cho for the International Herald Tribune

SEOUL, South Korea — ALL her life, Jane Jeong Trenka struggled to belong.

Born in South Korea in 1972, she and her sister were adopted by an American family and raised in a Minnesota town populated by the descendants of German and Scandinavian immigrants, where Lutheran churches rose above the cornfields.

In elementary school, Ms. Trenka says she was taunted by boys who spat racial slurs at her, causing her so much anxiety that she began throwing up during the bus ride to school. Later, after she brought a boy home for the first time, a Laotian from the only Asian family in town, she said her father made a joke about his name that she considered racist.

Smoldering with anger — and consumed by “self-loathing” for her Asian heritage — she scratched her Korean name, Kyong-ah, into her bedroom wall with a thumbtack. Then she covered it with a bulletin board so her parents would not know. When it came time for college, she checked “white” on all her college forms in what she now calls an act of self-deception.

It was that emotional conflict over identity that eventually led Ms. Trenka to upend her life, move back to South Korea and help lead a successful campaign with fellow adoptees to fundamentally change the way Koreans think about adoption. The landmark legislation they championed for the first time takes concrete steps to deal with the root causes of South Korea’s longstanding reputation as one of the world’s leading “baby exporters” — society’s deep prejudice against single mothers and against domestic adoptions thought to sully all-important family bloodlines.

The law stipulates for the first time that the government should reduce overseas adoptions of Korean children. It not only provides child-care stipends to encourage more Koreans to adopt and to support single women who want to keep their children, but it also requires mothers to live with their babies for a week and receive counseling about the option of keeping them, before they relinquish custody.

“I spent the first 40 years of my life as an adoptee, and Korea really hasn’t changed much about its adoption system,” Ms. Trenka, 41, said recently. “Do I want to spend the second half of my life letting these people get away with the damaging practices that created the first part of my life?”

Her struggle continues for more transparency in adoption proceedings that have been opaque for decades, in large part to protect unmarried women who have often faced the stark choice of secretly giving up their babies for adoption or enduring a social stigma. But experts say that wall of protection also allowed some abuses, including putting some children up for adoption whose parents might have only sought temporary shelter for them in orphanages.

Ms. Trenka’s long road from international adoptee to activist began, she now believes, with a lie.

SHE says her adoptive parents, who had no children, were told that her birth mother was an irresponsible unwed woman who had abandoned her and her sister. She was only an infant, and her sister was 4.

She was in her 20s when she finally met her birth mother and her family, she said, and they told a radically different story. The main reason she was put up for adoption, they said, was that her impoverished birth mother’s husband suspected that she was not his child and tried to smother her with a blanket before demanding that she be sent away. (It is less clear why her sister was given up.)

But once the two girls were gone, relatives said, Ms. Trenka’s birth mother became so distraught, she began carrying a dog the same way Koreans carry children, by securing it to her back with a blanket. She was so bereft, she managed to get the adoption agency to give her the name and address of the family that had adopted the girls.

Less than three months later, she scraped together what little money she had to send traditional dresses, or hanbok, for the girls and their adoptive mother. She later sent at least two letters, which Ms. Trenka believes did not reveal the real reason for the adoption but asked about the girls’ well-being.

Although she says her adoptive parents were also victims of the Korean agency’s deception, she believes the letters should have prompted them to question the claims of abandonment. Instead, she said, they answered her early questions about her birth mother by saying that they did not know why she had been unable to care for her girls, but that they would see her in heaven. Even when she found the letters, she said, her adoptive parents did little to help her connect with her birth family, leading to an estrangement that lasted for years.

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For Ms. Trenka, the much-longed-for meeting with her birth mother did not happen until she was 23 and had qualified for a credit card that allowed her to charge her trip. Separated by language, mother and daughter communicated through a translator. Her Korean mother, then 62, asked for her daughter’s forgiveness and bared her breasts to prove that she had breast-fed the two girls before they were separated.

Over the next five years, Ms. Trenka returned several times, before her birth mother died of cancer in 2000. They did not speak each other’s language, but Ms. Trenka said it was enough just to be with her. She slowly began to drift from the life she knew in Minnesota, eventually divorcing her American husband and writing two memoirs that connected her with other adoptees who shared her conviction that they had deserved better from their birth country.

Five years after her birth mother’s death, she left her job as a piano teacher and the sister she loves and moved to Korea.

By then, South Korea was beginning to change its stance on adoption. As the country became the world’s latest economic miracle, the government slowly began to whittle down the number of international adoptions that many saw as a national shame. Still, experts say the government was unwilling to take steps many felt were needed to shift the country’s mind-set until it was forced to by Ms. Trenka and her fellow adoptees, who were joined in their campaign by unwed mothers. They tirelessly lobbied lawmakers, wrote blogs, held protests and filed complaints with the human rights commission.

Unlike Ms. Trenka, some adoptees considered their experience a success, but still felt the country should work harder to keep its children or make the adoption process more transparent.

Critics worry that the new law has raced ahead of reality, slowing the adoption process for the many children for whom no Korean families can be found. But others say the law is long overdue and commend Ms. Trenka and her allies.

“The returnees’ leadership was instrumental to changing the way South Korea viewed adoptions,” said the Rev. Kim Do-hyun, director of KoRoot, an advocacy group for Korean adoptees.

These days, Ms. Trenka, who now speaks Korean, is pursuing a degree in public administration at Seoul National University to arm herself for her next major campaign: pushing to make the country’s birth registration system more transparent to make it easier for adoptees to trace their origins.

“In a country where ‘American’ is used synonymously with ‘white,’ my inability to speak fluent Korean combined with my inability to be white is a deformity,” she wrote in one of her memoirs. “I am a sort of monster, a mix of the familiar with the terribly unexpected, like a fish with a human face.”

She keeps in touch with her sister in the United States, but has not seen her adoptive parents since 2004. Even so, she said she sometimes finds herself missing them.

She calls South Korea her “unrequited love,” but said she was here to stay. “The Koreans have a saying,” she said, “that a fox goes back to where he was born to die.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2013, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: An Adoptee Returns, And Changes Follow. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe